[lingtalks] Dissertation defense for Hannah Rohde

[Corie Gochicoa]

Hannah Rohde will defend her dissertation on June 30th at 2PM in room 
AP&M 4301. Please see the attached poster.

TITLE: Coherence-Driven Effects in Sentence & Discourse Processing

This dissertation provides a psycholinguistic investigation of the 
influence of discourse on language comprehension. It examines factors 
that allow comprehenders to follow a discourse, to form representations 
of the events being described, and to make predictions about how 
subsequent utterances will relate to prior linguistic material. Previous 
work has recognized the importance of prediction in sentence-internal 
processing: transition probabilities at the phonemic level, semantic 
associations in lexical access, and structural frequencies at the 
syntactic level. The work presented here investigates whether learnable 
statistical regularities also exist at the discourse level, a topic that 
has remained largely unexplored in the psycholinguistics literature.

The dissertation presents a series of experiments testing the extent to 
which comprehenders use various pragmatic cues to make predictions about 
how a discourse will be continued. In order to quantify discourse-level 
information, the experiments use an inventory of coherence relations 
adopted from the theoretical linguistics and artificial intelligence 
literatures. The experimental results demonstrate that comprehenders do 
indeed make use of available pragmatic cues to generate expectations 
about upcoming coherence relations. Furthermore, the results show that 
the mechanisms for establishing coherence relations can inform our 
understanding of two well-studied sentence-internal phenomena: 
coreference and syntactic ambiguity. The on-line results establish the 
presence of these in comprehenders’ incremental sentence processing.

The coherence-based approach taken here provides a lens through which to 
view previous results in the domains of both coreference and syntactic 
ambiguity. The fact that phenomena in both these domains appear to be 
sensitive to coherence-driven biases suggests that these biases may be 
more pervasive than has been previously acknowledged. This work 
indicates that future processing models of sentence and discourse 
processing must take into account effects that emerge from discourse 
coherence.
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